Let Them Eat Bugs: Challenging the WEF’s Corporate-Driven Food Reset
It is clear that there are huge environmental, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed and that a paradigm shift is required.
The prevailing globalised agrifood model is built on unjust trade policies, the leveraging of sovereign debt, population displacement and land dispossession. It fuels commodity monocropping and food insecurity as well as soil and environmental degradation.
It is responsible for increasing rates of illness, nutrient-deficient diets, a narrowing of the range of food crops, water shortages, chemical runoffs, increasing levels of farmer indebtedness, the undermining and destruction of local communities and the eradication of biodiversity.
The model relies on a policy paradigm that privileges urbanisation, global markets, long supply chains, external proprietary inputs, highly processed food and market (corporate) dependency at the expense of rural communities, small independent enterprises and smallholder farms, local markets, short supply chains, on-farm resources, diverse agroecological cropping, nutrient dense diets and food sovereignty.
It is clear that there are huge environmental, social and health issues that stem from how much of our food is currently produced and consumed and that a paradigm shift is required.
So, some optimists – or wishful thinkers – might have hoped for genuine solutions to the problems and challenges outlined above during the second edition of the United Nations Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place last week in Rome.
The UNFSS has claimed that it aims to deliver the latest evidence-based, scientific approaches from around the world, launch a set of fresh commitments through coalitions of action and mobilise new financing and partnerships. These ‘coalitions of action’ revolve around implementing a ‘food transition’ that is more sustainable, efficient and environmentally friendly.
Founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UNFSS is, however, disproportionately influenced by corporate actors, lacks transparency and accountability and diverts energy and financial resources away from the real solutions needed to tackle the multiple hunger, environmental and health crises.
According to a recent article on The Canary website, key multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) appearing at the 2023 summit included the WEF, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, EAT (EAT Forum, EAT Foundation and EAT-Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthy Food Systems), the World Business Council on Sustainable Development and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.
The global corporate agrifood sector, including Coca-Cola, Danone, Kelloggs, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Tyson Foods, Unilever, Bayer and Syngenta, were also out in force along with Dutch Rabobank, the Mastercard Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Through its “strategic partnership” with the UN, the WEF regards MSIs as key to achieving its vision of a ‘great reset’ – in this case, a food transition. The summit comprises a powerful alliance of global corporations, influential foundations and rich countries that are attempting to capture the narrative of ‘food systems transformation’. These interests aim to secure greater corporate concentration and agribusiness leverage over public institutions.
Hannah Sharland, the author of the piece in The Canary, writes:
“… the UN is knowingly giving the very corporations sponsoring the destruction of the planet prime seats at the table. It is precisely these corporations who already shape the state of global food systems.”
She concludes that the solutions to a burgeoning world crisis cannot be found in the corporate capitalist system that manufactured it.
During a press conference on 17 July 2023, representatives from the People’s Autonomous Response to the UNFSS highlighted the urgent, coordinated actions required to address global hunger. The response came in the form of a statement from those representing food justice movements, small-scale food producer organisations and indigenous peoples.
The statement denounced the United Nations’ approach. Saúl Vicente from the International Indian Treaty Council said that the summit’s organisers aimed to sell their corporate and industrial project as ‘transformation’.
The movements and organisations opposing the summit call for a rapid shift away from corporate-driven industrial models towards biodiverse, agroecological, community-led food systems that prioritise the public interest over profit making. This entails guaranteeing the rights of peoples to access and control land and productive resources while promoting agroecological production and peasant seeds.
The response to the summit adds that, despite the increasing recognition that industrial food systems are failing on so many fronts, agribusiness and food corporations continue to try to maintain their control. They are deploying digitalization, artificial intelligence and other information and communication technologies to promote a new wave of farmer dependency or displacement, resource grabbing, wealth extraction and labour exploitation and to re-structure food systems towards a greater concentration of power and ever more globalised value chains.
Shalmali Guttal, from Focus on the Global South, says:
“… people from all over the world have presented concrete, effective strategies… food sovereignty, agroecology, revitalisation of biodiversity, territorial markets and a solidarity-based economy. The evidence is overwhelming – the solutions devised by small-scale food producers and Indigenous Peoples not only feed the world but also advance gender, social, economic justice, youth empowerment, workers’ rights and real resilience to crises.”
Guttal asks “why are policy makers not listening to this and providing adequate support?”
That’s easily answered. The UN has climbed into bed with the WEF and unaccountable corporate agrifood and big data giants, which have no time for democratic governance.
A new report by FIAN International was released in parallel to the statement from the People’s Autonomous Response. The report – Food Systems Transformation – In which direction? – calls for an urgent overhaul of the global food governance architecture to guarantee decision making that prioritises the public good and the right to food for all.
Sofia Monsalve, secretary general of FIAN International, says:
“The main stumbling block for taking effective action towards more resilient, diversified, localized and agroecological food systems are the economic interests of those who advance and benefit from corporate-driven industrial food systems.”
These interests are promoting multistakeholderism: a process that involves corporations and their front groups and armies of lobbyists co-opting public bodies to act on their behalf in the name of ‘feeding the world’ and ‘sustainability’.
A process that places powerful private interests in the driving seat, steering policy makers to facilitate corporate needs while sidelining the strong concerns and solutions being forwarded by many civil society, small-scale food producers’ and workers’ organisations and indigenous peoples as well as prominent academics.
The very corporations that are responsible for the problems of the prevailing food system. They offer more of the same, this time packaged in a biosynthetic, genetically-engineered, bug-eating, ecomodernist, fake-green wrapping (see the online article From net zero to glyphosate: agritech’s greenwashed corporate power grab’).
Go paid at the $5 a month level, and we will send you both the PDF and e-Pub versions of “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! and a coupon code for 10% off anything in the Government-Scam.com/Store.
Go paid at the $50 a year level, and we will send you a free paperback edition of Etienne’s book “Government” - The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! AND a 64GB Liberator flash drive if you live in the US. If you are international, we will give you a $10 credit towards shipping if you agree to pay the remainder.
Support us at the $250 Founding Member Level and get an Everything Bundle – The Sampler of Liberty! - Get it free by going paid as a Founding Member!
Give me Liberty... and give me more! The Everything Bundle includes the latest version of our flagship book on government, along with a collection of potentially life-altering introductions to voluntaryism, agorism and peaceful anarchy.
“Government” – The Biggest Scam in History… Exposed! by Etienne de la Boetie2
Anarchy Exposed! - A former police officer reports on his investigative journeyby Shepard the Voluntaryist and Larken Rose
The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose
Sedition, Subversion and Sabotage – Field Manual #1 by Ben Stone, The Bad Quaker, and Ken Yamarashi
What Anarchy Isn’t– A short pamphlet by Larken Rose… The perfect introduction to peaceful anarchy
Three Friends Free – A Children’s Story of Voluntaryism
The Liberator is a 64GB wafer flash drive filled with books, documentaries, podcasts, MP3s, short videos, and music from the truth movement’s leading artists. The credit card-sized format makes it convenient to keep in your wallet to share and copy easily.
For generations we've swallowed the well entrenched hype set in place so long ago, that bigger is better, that prowess in war is a desirable activity; probably promulgated by some men long ago, but supported by women. It may well have been a necessary concept under certain circumstances, but is now completely out of control, outdated, and has for decades slowly led to the imbalances we see. An intelligent species will seek and find alternative routes to take. The powers that shouldn't be seek even Bigger (world gov.) and actively seek 'enemies' for gain, of both egotistical and financial desires To continue to follow such dreams leading to endless destruction and misery for millions is to be actively stupid or hypnotised by the endless propaganda that 'others', even 'germs' are out to 'get us'! Egoistic warmongers have been singing that song for far to long. Time to change channels.